Woman's mummified body found in Pontiac garage

By John Turk

Thursday, March 6, 2014

john.turk@oakpress.com @jrturk on Twitter

For years she sat dead inside a car in her Pontiac garage, and virtually no one knew.

A woman’s body, mummified from as many as six years of Michigan seasons, was found around 5 p.m. Wednesday at a home on the 1600 block of Savanna Drive. The woman was discovered by a property management company employee who was called to check on the foreclosed home, and it is thought to be the woman who the Jeep was registered to and who had lived at the home.

No one in the pleasant neighborhood, which is near Walton Boulevard and Telegraph Road, noticed anything suspicious over the years, said Darryl Tillery, who lives a few houses down the road.

“We’re all very nice and cordial to each other around here,” said Tillery, 49, who has lived on Savanna Street around four years. “Come to think of it, (the woman who lived at the home) was pretty much the only person I didn’t know ... but there were never any signs of anything out of the norm. The mail didn’t pile up and the grass was always cut.”

He said he thought it was “pretty weird for that to go unnoticed for that long.”

The woman’s body — found in the back seat of her car with the windows up, wearing a winter coat, denim jeans and a blouse — showed no signs of trauma, according to the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Bernardino Pacris, the forensic pathologist who examined the body, said a skeletal scan showed no fracturing of any of the woman’s bones, no trauma to the skull and no bullet or any foreign object in the body.

The investigation is active as detectives do not yet know who the woman is, how long she has been dead, or what caused her death.

The woman’s body went unfound because automatic payments from the homeowner’s bank to the utilities and mortgage were made, said Undersheriff Michael McCabe. A neighbor cut her grass, thinking she had moved away.

“Everything was deducted from her bank account,” McCabe said.

If the woman is the homeowner, McCabe said, she would be 49 now. It does not appear to be a suicide because the vehicle’s key was in the off position and she was in the back seat.

She could have died around 2008 because her vehicle registration expired then. The body remained hidden until the $54,000 in the bank account had depleted and the foreclosure process had started.

Detectives are awaiting toxicology reports and dental records. A couple of relatives of the homeowner, a German woman, have been located and will be interviewed. It was not immediately known what her relationship was to them.

“Right now, the most important thing is to identify the body,” said Pacris, adding fingerprinting wasn’t possible at this point. “A dental X-ray will hopefully match (the one doctors took during the autopsy) to identify her.”

What was interesting, he added, was deputies found the car’s ignition was in the “off” position.

What sparked the check?

A neighbor across the street said the woman who lived at the home — which had caution tape wrapped around it — moved in around 14 years ago, around the same time he moved there.

She had a European accent, and when he first met her, she told him she worked for Chrysler. He thought she might be German, he said.

“She kept to herself. I figured she traveled a lot, because she wouldn’t be home for months, then I’d see her off and on,” said the man, who asked to remain anonymous. “When I didn’t see her for a while when the economy went bad, I thought she left ... someone said she moved to California.”

The neighbor said he thought she had a son, as well. He didn’t know whether they were on good terms. The neighbor said he has two adult children, who he sees every week, and if he didn’t see them for even a month, “I’d be curious, want to know what’s going on or if they were sick ... it’d be worrying to me.”

He said when he recently noticed a hole in the roof of the woman’s home, he called his mortgage company — who happened to be the same as hers — and they sent a property restoration worker to the home.

“The third or fourth check is when the guy found her,” said the unnamed neighbor. “When you hear about something like this, you think about all the crazy stuff ... I don’t know ... ‘Who knew she was dead, did she do this herself, did someone murder her?’”

Doctor on process of mummification

While examiners are still piecing together what may have happened to the 49-year-old woman, Pacris said the hot and cold temperatures — mixed with the enclosed atmosphere of the car — led to the woman’s parchment-like, leathery skin complexion.

“This condition was not altered by any insects ... mosquitos or flies could not get inside,” he said. “It’s the environmental changes — the humidity of the air ... hot and cold conditions — that causes this mummification. In cases of cold weather, what we see is a ... formation of really hard fats in the body, and there’s a marbling and bloating of the skin.”

Investigators, meanwhile, had to contend with difficult conditions, which slowed down the search of the house, as rampant black mold forced deputies and Waterford firefighters to wear hazardous material suits, McCabe said. With so many unknowns, investigators treated it as a crime scene.

Strong reactions

The case brought strong reactions from readers.

Waterford Township native Susie Moultrup Al-Shimary said, “My heart hurts to think there was nobody. Not one caring soul who would miss this poor lady. ... Hope God’s showering her with the love she never received here. Truly a very sad story.”

Pontiac resident Helen Cinqueranelli Kotwicki said, “Unfortunately this is the state of the times. We no longer live in neighborhoods, but blocks. Most people are distrustful of their neighbors, so they don’t interact with each other as when I was growing up.”